.htaccess rewrite with WordPress plugin

Question

I am working on building a WordPress plugin for a custom WordPress multisite network and have a few files that use URL variables to load information from a second database (not the WordPress database).

In the version built outside of WordPress by navigating to http://website.com/NAME-HERE it would check to see if it is a username in my database, if not check to see if its a group in my database and load the file that corresponds to if its a username or group.

Now I'm totally lost about implementing this into WordPress Multisite. As far as I know plugins can't make .htaccess rewrites? How do I make it work on all the network sites?

If not whats the best way to accomplish this?

Do I need to place my pretty.php & .htaccess rewrites into my root directory and point the pages to the files located in the plugin? If so how does this work with multiple themes?

At this point I figured my best bet was to reach out to the StackOverflow community for assistance or direction.

.htaccess

RewriteEngine On  
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]  
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]  

RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteRule ^(\w.+)$ ./pretty.php?pretty=$1 [QSA]

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

pretty.php

// First check if passed pretty parameter is a username.
if(checkIfUserByUsername($_GET['pretty']))
{
    $_GET['username'] = $_GET['pretty'];
    
    include("USERNAME.php");

// If not a username, check to see if it's an event.
}else if(checkIfStreamByPretty($_GET['pretty'])){
    $_GET['id'] = getStreamIdFromPretty($_GET['pretty']);
    
    include("GROUP.php");
}else{
    // If it's none, redirect to the 404 page.

    include("404.php");
}

Answer 1

There are a handful of ways you could approach this, if I am understanding what you want to achieve. You likely don't need to use any rewrites.

The easiest solution would be to add your "pretty.php" code to your header.php file in your Wordpress template. This will load on every request to the front end of the website. If you need it to load the code only on a specific page, simply check for what page you are on using is_page.

for example, in your header.php:

if(is_page("groups")){
  if(checkIfUserByUsername($_GET['pretty']))
  {
    // the rest of your code
  }
}

If you want to write a Wordpress plugin, you just need to use "add_action" in your plugin:

add_action('wp_head', 'function_containing_your_code');

Again, this will load on every page so simply check that your are on the page you want to load your code on.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/wp_head https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/is_page/

Also, you can edit your .htaccess file just like you can edit any file that your user has permission to edit. Assuming you are running an apache server, your .htaccess file needs to have permissions that allow the file to be edited and you can edit the file with PHP. for example:

$file = fopen("/path/to/.htaccess", "a+");
fwrite($f, "RewriteRule ^(\w.+)$ ./pretty.php?pretty=$1 [QSA]");
fclose($f);

Many people would say that it is a security risk to have PHP writing to your .htaccess file. I would say that in some circumstances that is true, but certainly not always. Make you understand permissions before allowing PHP to write to your .htaccess file.